![]() These fish then travel up the river systems and deep inland through the vast network of waterways. The fish are then either eaten by seabirds which in turn deposit their own poop on land, or feed larger migratory fish. These nutrients help to fuel the plankton, which make their way into smaller fish. You wouldn’t realize it, but there is a nutrient pump that exists which comes from the ocean up the rivers and onto the land.”Īnimals such as whales and fish poop nutrients into the water. “For example, there is research we cite which shows how important nutrients from the oceans are for massive biomes like the Amazon. These are the systems in which nutrients are cycled through the environment on a global scale. “We didn’t realise until a few years ago just how important large animals are to large scale earth system processes,” explains Ken. Fish and Wildlife Serviceīut these big animals have an impact on a much larger scale even than this. In the depths of the African rainforest, elephants create and maintain huge forest openings known as bais, which are then used by an array of other species from bongo antelopes to gorillas. They are also known to help sustain entire rainforests as they spread the large seeds of fruit trees over vast distances before depositing them in little piles of natural fertilizer. This is because as they go about their day-to-day business, these huge animals alter their environment in such dramatic ways that they help to create and maintain entirely new habitats.Įlephants, for example, are so big that they will regularly push down trees to get to food from the upper branches, and as a result open up woodlands that allow understory plants to thrive in the sunshine. Large animals, such as elephants and whales, are often referred to as ecosystem engineers. The opinion piece has been published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. “Currently we are not conserving those systems at scales large enough to protect and restore these key ecological roles. “But there are also a lot of fundamental things these animals do ecologically, and we are only just beginning to understand the really massive scales on which they operate. “These big animals are iconic in a conservation sense and we are not arguing that we shouldn’t conserve them in their own right,” explains Ken. Ken Norris, Head of Life Sciences at the Museum, has published a piece with colleagues that raises the question of how conservationists could think more globally. Once we know more, it could change the way we go about protecting them.īig animals are influencing environments such as the Amazon not only on national or international scales, but even global ones. It is only relatively recently, however, that we have begun to understand just how wide reaching the influence of these animals is on the natural world. Elephants, rhinos, and some species of whales are all balancing on the edge of extinction. Those large animals that did survive the first round are now facing a similar threat. These species had a significant impact on the habitats in which they lived, and when they were driven to extinction, they left an ecological hole. Giant ground sloths and armored glyptodons roamed across the savannas of South America, huge mammoths and cave bears were trampling around the chilly landscapes of Europe, while truly enormous wombat-like diprotodons and moas were to be found across much of Australia and New Zealand. When people spread out of Africa and first arrived in places like the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and Europe, the land was dominated by some truly huge animals.
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